FACED with a monstrous traffic jam, Beijing finally came up with a solution of sorts.

The capital city last week announced several measures aimed at easing the gridlock that has paralyzed its motorways for the past few weeks.

From next year, car owners registering for a license plate will have to participate in a public lottery, with 20,000 plates up for grabs each month.

Theoretically, it will limit the number of cars on Beijing's roads. Moreover, vehicles with provincial plates will be banned from the city's ring roads during working hours.

While unveiling the new scheme, Beijing authorities also announced a freeze on the number of municipal government cars. While this was welcomed as a step toward streamlining the ever-growing official car fleet, it has no influence at all over the central government's use and purchase of cars.

In the debate about pros and cons, the fairness issue has again surfaced. Some have complained about differential treatment because number plates will only go to applicants with a Beijing hukou, or residence permit, and to those non-locals who have paid tax for at least five years.

And a thorny issue is whether the privileged class, civil servants or Party cadres, can get the coveted number plates at the expense of others - though a government spokesman insisted the results won't be rigged.

Beijing is no stranger to congestion. We may well argue that it's common in metropolises. But that it is so acute in Beijing, despite vigorous efforts to tackle it, should provoke some thoughts.

The city has tried a host of measures to disentangle its snarled traffic. Most notably, it has introduced an even-and-odd number plate scheme that allows private cars on Beijing's roads on alternate days. But what purpose can it serve when newly added vehicles are hitting the roads daily by the hundreds, or even thousands?

So if failed past attempts to untie the traffic Gordian knot tell us anything, it is that the traditional governing philosophy of "creating the problem and taking care of it" will reap no substantial benefits.

Just as doctors cannot feed fat, even in small amounts, to patients with severely clogged arteries, the vision of lighter traffic while car ownership keeps rising is a mere illusion.

Therefore, it doesn't take a genius to see that Beijing's new number plate policy will become yet another long shot, adding to the traffic pandemonium rather than relieving it.

Bars raised

Any major public policy change will inevitably affect millions and meet opposition. But the discussion will miss the point if we bog down over the technicalities, including whether it curtails drivers' rights or how much more it will cost them to switch to other transport.

Of course, many drivers can reasonably ask why the bars on driving are raised for them, as the government has been long cajoling people into buying cars. Why should they bear the brunt of a ballooning problem that's essentially not of their making?

But the right question is how they got led astray into this bizarre situation where owning an item doesn't necessarily mean it can be used.

Driven by the government imperative to bolster car making as a pillar industry, China's private car ownership soared in recent years. China has overtaken the US as the largest auto market, and this position will be cemented by 2020, when the nation's cars are projected to top 200 million - nearly one in six Chinese will own a car.

But the rapid surge in vehicle numbers is generating mixed feelings. When some happily enjoy its benefits, others bear its very Chinese consequences: incessant horn-honking, bad driving, drunk driving and disregard for the lives of "lesser beings" on foot or on two wheels.

And it is putting the cities' highways and roads under mounting strain - either they are broadened to accommodate more cars, or transport becomes an impossible mess. Herein lies the crux of the problem. Unless the number of cars stops rising, the newly constructed roads will quickly be gobbled up and turned into a slowly moving parking lot.

While the authorities are now vigorously touting public transport, it's already a belated call and the existing facilities, such as the subway, are not designed to handle the increasing passenger flow and are less appealing to minds mesmerized by the glamor of car ownership.

I'm often asked when I plan to buy a car, as if this were the only worthy way of commuting. Every time I have to explain that I don't need and can't afford that luxury.

I'm no Luddite or iconoclast of the car culture. Since receiving my driver's license three years ago, I have never sat behind the wheel. Seeing so many people, my father included, fuming behind the wheel in bursts of road rage, I decide not to become one of them unless forced to.

But principles about public transport may gradually lose ground as car culture barges into our life, especially when the government's tacit approval has turned into open endorsement in the form of tax breaks for car buyers.

So how serious are Beijing officials about reducing vehicles?

After making public its new number plate scheme, Beijing authorities emphatically distanced themselves from Shanghai's congestion-fighting practice - the monthly auction of number plates.

The government now finds itself in a bind. It is paying a high price for its short-term thinking and cannot be seen as further sitting on its hands while congestion worsens.

But officials pursuing GDP crave the revenue from car makers. Once they are promoted to higher office for boosting domestic consumption, they can leave behind the mess they make without any sense of guilt. The bitter fruit of their folly is for their successors and the commoners to swallow.

Trade-off

And this delicate balance requires a big trade-off, not from a few crying foul over the "discriminatory" number plate mechanism, but from the millions of real losers to this auto craze.

Apart from suffering from the reign of terror on roads, they are confined to increasingly narrow bike lanes and sidewalks while cars cruise past them in often five- or 10-lane highways.

Unlike big auto factories that can lobby the government for favorable policies, they are in no position to negotiate.

Which makes the so-called comeback of bikes a frivolous idea only conceivable in glossy magazines. China was once known as a "kingdom of bikes," but this kingdom is long lost.

When French musician Jean Michel Jarre first visited China in the 1980s, the peddling of street-side hawkers, yawns of idle people, and the sound of frolicking kids in the streets inspired him to compose melodies about China. One piece called "China" starts and concludes with bike bell rings. Unmistakably Chinese.

Those were the days. As Chinese cities now are built more for machines than for the people, can Jarre still find his echt China when standing by the roads of Beijing or Shanghai where cars whiz past like a swarm of locusts creating only foul air and deafening noise?